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Glittering
Stones >> Huge Diamond
Huge diamond
Fri, 13 Feb 2004 - Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics had found a diamond
in space, and it's big… actually big. The object, strictly
known as BPM 37093, is a crystallized white dwarf star roughly
4,000 km across. The astronomers call it a diamond, because it's
made up of crystallized carbon bounded by a thin layer of hydrogen
and helium gasses. It's understood that this is the final outcome
for many stars, including our own Sun. In five billion years our
Sun would become a white dwarf and three billion years after that
the carbon would crystallize to form a gigantic diamond.
The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized
carbon 55 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurs.
(A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about
6 trillion miles.) It is 2,590 miles across and weighs 6 million
trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 12 billion
trillion carats, and a one followed by 34 zeros.
"It's the mother of all diamonds!" says Metcalfe. "Some
people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song
'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.'"
The diamond star completely outclasses the prime diamond on Earth,
the 532-carat Star of Africa which resides in the circlet Jewels
of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the main diamond ever
found on Earth, a 3,120-carat gem.
The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is in fact
a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a
star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear energy and
dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is covered by a thin layer
of hydrogen and helium gases.
For more than four decades, astronomers have consideration that
the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct
evidence became likely only recently.
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